rney Colonel House and I became on very
friendly and intimate terms, which should have helped to bring
about such a peace.

CHAPTER IV

ECONOMIC QUESTIONS

In the preceding chapter I mentioned that Dr. Dernburg's plan for
raising a loan in the United States had failed. Later the direction
of all our economic and financial affairs passed into the hands of
Geheimrat Albert. His original task was to organize in New York
extensive shipments of foodstuffs, particular wheat and fats, which
were to be exported through the New York office of the Hamburg-Amerika
line. This depended, in the first place, on the possibility of
raising the necessary funds, and in the second, on the possibility
that England, out of regard for the neutrals, and particularly the
United States, would be compelled to abide by the codified principles
of international law. Neither of these premises materialized.

As the necessary means for carrying through the scheme could not be
raised it might have been possible to finance it if the Government
had taken over the not inconsiderable funds of the German banks and
the great industrial enterprises, e.g., the chemical factories in
the United States, and used them for the shipments. The suggestions
we made to this effect were not answered until the end of August,
when we arrived in New York and had already lost many weeks in
trying to negotiate the loan. One organ, which immediately after
the war had taken up these questions on its own initiative, failed,
and so nothing was done in the whole wide sphere of credit, supply
of raw materials and foodstuffs and shipping until my arrival with
the other gentlemen, so that the most favorable opportunity was lost.
Remittances from Germany did not arrive until long afterwards, and
then only to a very modest extent. Consequently the whole economic
scheme was considerably narrowed and hampered from the beginning.

The second assumption, that the United States, in consideration
of her great commercial connections with Germany, would maintain
her rights as a neutral State to unrestricted sea trade within the
provisions of international law, proved to be unfounded. The United
States, at any rate according to the view of some very distinguished
Americans, as, for example, in the journal _New Republic_, violated
the spirit of neutrality when she allowed commerce of the neutrals
one with another to be strangled by England. To the interest in
traffic with the neutral